It came like all dreams do: sudden, unwelcome, and in a language that refused to explain itself. I was in a city I almost recognized—something between memory and myth. The buildings were taller than I remembered, but somehow emptier, like they had been hollowed out to make space for secrets. The sky hung low, as if it, too, was burdened by what it had witnessed.

There was drumming. Not loud. Not proud. Just steady—like a heartbeat trying not to falter. The sound pulled me through alleyways with no names, past walls where the paint had peeled back like old lies. I followed it without thinking, without questioning. The rhythm was magnetic, undeniable, like truth echoing in the bones.

And there he was.

A man sitting cross-legged on the stone, palms to earth, coaxing sound from soil like it was a hymn only he remembered. I knew his face the way you know a story that’s been told too many times to be false. He didn’t look at me. He didn’t need to. He was too busy listening—to the ground, to the silence, to something older than law.

There were sheets of paper strewn beside him. Wind kept lifting them, but they wouldn’t fly away. Each page trembled as though it was ashamed of what it contained.

I watched, frozen. Not from awe. From something colder. My hands began to shake, but I couldn’t tell if it was the chill or the knowing. There was something coming. Not seen. Not spoken. Just… arriving. Like a sentence already written.

The air changed. I could smell metal. Hear it too. The clink of it—quiet but final—like chains pretending not to be chains. I saw the glint before I saw the figures. They didn’t walk so much as glide. Shadows made of law and smoke. They had no faces, but they didn’t need them. The certainty with which they moved was enough to silence the world.

The man looked up for the first time. Not with fear. Not with defiance. Just… with understanding. Like someone who’d long known this page in the story would come.

One of them stepped forward. The moment their hand reached out, the drumbeat stopped. Not gradually. Like a door slammed in the middle of a sentence.

The silence that followed was so loud I could barely hear my own breath.

And then came the sound that has stayed with me most of all: metal against skin. Not harsh. Not violent. Just… deliberate. Like punctuation. Like the last word in a poem you were never meant to read.

My feet wouldn’t move. My tongue glued itself to the roof of my mouth. I wanted to scream, to run, to do something—but all I could do was stand there and watch this man be folded into the fog. Not disappeared. Not taken. Just… erased, as if he had never belonged to the soil he drummed on.

I did not understand it.

Even in the dream, I could not piece together what he had done to deserve such silence.

All I knew was that when I looked down, the ball-point pen I was holding had fallen from my hand. And I could not pick it up.